You have no idea how clueless L.A. is when it comes to water. Your vote on our $100K grant proposal can help change that.

Do you know the source of the water that comes out of your tap?  Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t. The vast majority of Angelenos have no idea where their water comes from.

Well, Heal the Bay is on a mission to change that. We need a water literate L.A. We can’t expect people to advocate for a more sustainable future for L.A. if they are clueless when it comes to water.

That’s where you come in. We need your vote to win a $100,000 grant that will help us implement “Dropping Knowledge,” a grassroots community outreach and education campaign about local water.

Teaming with our powerful community partners Pacific Asian Volunteer Assn. (PAVA) and Pacoima Beautiful, we will saturate the region to provide a “Water 101” to community groups, neighborhood councils, schools and business organizations. We’re going to do it the Heal the Bay way – which means fun, hands-on, volunteer-driven and solution-focused.

So what’s the first lesson? We don’t have a water problem; we have a water management problem.

If you want L.A. to be smarter about water, all you need to do is give us your vote in the LA2050 competition.

You can learn a lot hanging out with motivated students, says Heal the Bay staffer Jenn Swart. Find out how you can get your school to join Club Heal the Bay.

With predictions of a wet El Niño winter and a deluge of sewage-related waste being released into Santa Monica Bay from a local sewage treatment plant, it’s clear that school environmental clubs have their work cut out for them.

But where to start?

 Last Sunday, 25 students representing nine different middle and high school environmental clubs crept into the closed-to-the-public Santa Monica Pier Aquarium to try and answer that question.

At the Heal the Bay-led after-hours workshop, it became clear that it’s easier to highlight a problem than to actually choose and plan an action to help. Clubs brainstormed their goals for the school year and then grouped them into themes common across all clubs.

Some examples were “Smarter Members and Smarter Schools,” in which education on current environmental issues is key; “Alternatives at School,” which tackles changing the way schools do things; “Cleanups”, which can be completed from coast to campus; and “Awareness Through Social Media,” where dedicated accounts can keep members and followers up-to-date with club happenings.

Choosing S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound) tasks or projects is crucial to seeing goals blossom, attendees learned. The group was lucky to hear from three youth leaders who’ve all completed dynamic projects in the past. From cleanups and fundraising, to youth boards and media interviews, Ben Moody, Fallon Rabin and Paige Hornbaker had great tips to share with the group.

The summit wrapped up with time for each club to reflect on what proposed projects would suit their vision for the year and then plot those goals onto a calendar of the school year. As a registered Club Heal the Bay partner, school groups also learned that participating in three events or netting three reward “drops” would earn them an invitation to our Beachy Celebration, which we will host at the end of the school year.

Whether it’s educating their own peers, spreading environmental awareness through social media alerts, or fundraising within their communities or local businesses, clubs from all grade levels and with varying membership bases strategized how to make a big splash this school year.

I’m looking forward to seeing many of our summit attendees and getting to meet their club members at October’s Nothin’ But Sand Beach Cleanup, this Saturday from 10 a.m.-noon. 

July 1, 2015 — Sarah Sikich, Heal the Bay’s vice president, commemorates what would have been a historic day for California by rallying shoppers to shun the plastic bag and show off their reusable bags.

The plastic bag war has not been won. Yet.

California’s historic ban on single-use plastic bags would have gone into effect today. Instead, hordes of plastics industry representatives swarmed our state over the past year in an effort to undo this landmark law.

Flashback to September 2014, when Governor Brown signed SB 270 into law, enacting the nation’s first comprehensive single-use bag law. The twofold measure would ban plastic bag distribution at grocery stores, pharmacies and other retailers, while requiring a minimum charge for paper bags. We were excited for California to become the first state in the nation to make shopping more sustainable by incentivizing reusable bags. But while the Governor’s signature was still drying on the bag ban, Big Plastic spent over $3 million on a signature-gathering campaign that ended up putting the ban on hold until November 2016. But we’re moving forward anyway, and we need your help.

In the absence of a statewide bag law, we are urging everyone to go reusable and show off your green cred. Join our #MyBag social media campaign by posting a selfie showing off your eco-chic reusable bags. Post your sustainable selfie to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and include a short statement about why you support California’s plastic bag ban. Don’t forget to tag #MyBag or #MiBolsa to spread the word!

While you are busy sharing your green shopping experience, local governments continue to take a stand against plastic pollution. Since 2007, 137 California cities and counties have adopted bans on single-use plastic bags, curbing costly and unsightly plastic bag pollution. The City of Los Angeles alone spends an estimated $36 million each year on litter clean-up and abatement, of which a large amount is plastic bags. Here in the L.A. area, Hermosa Beach is the next community poised to ban the bag.

Californians use over 13 billion single-use plastic bags every year. The average shopper uses 500 single-use bags each year. Your vote and your actions count. Implementation of California’s landmark bag ban may have been delayed, but it’s not derailed. Post your #MyBag selfie, spread the word, talk with your friends.

Together, we can end the plastic bag plague once and for all.

Dorothy Green, Heal the Bay’s founding president, always looked at the Big Picture. In the chess game that is California politics, she always thought two moves ahead. When it came to advocating for effective change, she had an uncanny ability to cut to the heart of the matter. Long before our drought reached epidemic proportions, she warned about the havoc that would arise from the state’s dysfunctional water supply management.

Indeed, just days before her death in 2008, Dorothy Green’s last public act was an editorial in the Los Angeles Times outlining her recommendations to improve water management in California. These prescient words ring true today.

 Dorothy’s Law 

Water supply sources from the Colorado River and within the state are at record lows, given the current conditions of global warming. The ecological collapse of the San Francisco Bay Delta heightens the legal and regulatory restrictions of water allocations. Land use development continues disconnected from sustainable water supplies. Current bond proposals are geared to fund dams and canals, which is a supply option from the past. These are the very policies that combined with wasting water, got us to where we are today, which is a looming water crisis. By putting first things first, Dorothy’s priorities to manage water will bring us forward to the 21st century.

We call upon the State of California to sufficiently fund the State Water Resources Control Board so that it can do its duty effectively. We call upon the State Water Resources Control Board to:

• Create a meaningful structure for water rights that will conduct a review of past water-rights decisions to bring them in line with existing supplies, and allocate water according to the public trust doctrine.
• Call for an end to federal subsidies for water-intensive crops. Instead, let the free market control pricing for those types of crops.
• Conduct an exhaustive and critical review of water transfers.
• Set mandatory statewide conservation targets for all water uses.
• Develop a sustainable water plan with enforcement mechanisms, to include financial penalties and operating restrictions, as well as an independent and public biennial assessment of the plan’s implementation.
• Develop a steady revenue stream to improve water rights and enforcement system.
• The sustainable water plan should:

1. demand an allocation of water rights based on available supply
2. implement a ban on discharging wastewater into our drinking water supplies unless it meets public health standards
3. meter every water use throughout the state
4. require use of recycled water throughout the state
5. mandate low-impact development for all projects, including transportation
6. fast track a groundwater cleanup program.

This synopsis was assembled for Dorothy’s memorial by several environmental leaders that she mentored:  Mark Gold, former president of Heal the Bay; Paula Daniels, former Heal the Bay board president and appointee to the California Water Commission; and Conner Everts, executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance